Mar 08
2
Flight Interrupted
Posted by Stephen2
Tags: aircraft, patience, Sunday, travel, trials and tribulations
So I’m stuck in yet another hotel room. I’d been so looking forward to getting home, too. The plan was to arrive home this afternoon, changing planes in Frankfurt along the way. Instead, I got to look out the terminal window as my plane pushed back from the jetway on its way home without me. Now I’m stranded at an airport hotel in Frankfurt.
I was up bright and early this morning, too. I wanted to make sure nothing went wrong, that I had plenty of time. I checked in at the Budapest airport so early, in fact, that I managed to get an ideal seat for both flights. I was pleased. The early morning paid off.
At the boarding lounge we were told that the flight had been delayed by an hour. There was nothing wrong with the plane–it was parked right there ready for us to board–but high winds at Frankfurt, our destination, had forced the airport to cut its arrivals in half. We couldn’t take off until we were given a landing slot.
An hour later we all boarded the plane. I was a little concerned about my connecting flight, but still hopeful because there were three hours scheduled between flights. That was now down to two hours, not as much but still eminently doable.
We sat on the plane for another two hours before we took off.
No hope of making my flight now. The only glimmer of a possibility was if that flight was also delayed. When we landed in Frankfurt I set off at a fast stride toward the appropriate gate, boarding pass in hand. About halfway there I looked out the windows to see my plane pushing back. I knew it was my plane because the gate number was on a big panel on the jetway outside. It was right on time. So much for that glimmer of hope.
So I trudged back to the heart of the terminal to join half the airport in a queue to rebook my flight. It was 1:30pm. There was another scheduled flight at 5:30pm. Four hours. That should be enough, right? When I joined the queue a helpful official informed us that the line was currently a two-hour wait. Sigh. Maybe I’d have enough time to catch that 5:30 flight, but I doubted it. I ended up waiting almost five hours in that line. They re-booked me on a flight leaving tomorrow morning at 10. I guess it could have been worse. A couple of guys behind me were on their way to Bahrain, with only two direct flights a week. They’d have to wait several days or take a roundabout way home. A girl in front of me was headed for Istanbul. She managed to get on a 10:30 flight that night. She was lucky. A group of business travelers were going to Bangalore for a time-critical phase of their technical operations. They would miss their window of opportunity, and were debating in gloomy tones whether to press on or just turn around and go home. A fellow traveler from Budapest was wondering if he’d make it to his dying grandmother’s bedside on time.
It’s interesting the conversations you strike up with total strangers when you spend hours in line. The Budapest traveler taught Hungarian literature and history at university, and it was fun to relate my touristic and linguistic experiences of the past week and hear him add historic and cultural background. We exchanged email addresses and promised to keep in touch.
Later I found a YouTube video of a plane attempting to land at Munich, suffering from the same winds that held us up at Frankfurt (video here). From news service AeroNewsNet:
As the pilot attempted to straighten things out with the rudder, the airliner smacked the runway hard on its left main gear… and then things really got interesting, as a gust of wind lifted the right wing, tipping the aircraft until its left wingtip hit the pavement.
After watching the video I realized that it really wasn’t a good day to be flying. I was glad to be safe and sound, even if delayed. And I made some new friends.
